Secretary of State Clinton must accept that most Israelis object to two-state solution. … Israeli democracy has spoken: Most Israeli citizens do not wish to establish an Arab terror state in ‘our’ homeland. If your democracy is real, you should of course respect the democracy of others as well. …

… he quotes president Clinton’s reaction to Bibi’s retreat from a commitment. “At times he was tough,” writes Ross, “yelling at Bibi when he retracted an earlier pledge on Palestinian prisoners. ‘This is just chicken shit. I’m not going to put up with this kind of bullshit.'” Aaron David Miller, who was Ross’ deputy, also documented the days of Bibi and Bill. In his book “The Much Too Promised Land,” Miller relates that during their first meeting in the summer of 1996, Bibi lectured the president about the Arab-Israeli issue, prompting Clinton to expostulate when it was over, “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?” Most definite of all is Joe Lockhart, who was the White House spokesman at the time.

In a recorded interview to Clayton Swisher, author of the book “The Truth About Camp David,” he described Netanyahu as “one of the most obnoxious individuals you’re going to come into – just a liar and a cheat. He could open his mouth and you could have no confidence that anything that came out of it was the truth.” …

Benjamin Netanyahu will have a tense time when he visits Washington. … Washington at the beginning of the Obama era has the feel of a city that has just been liberated from foreign occupation, or of a person who just snapped out of an inexplicable psychotic episode. The paranoia of the Bush days has passed. …

… The conservative line of AIPAC, the veteran pro-Israel lobby, is no longer the only understanding of how to support Israel. The principle of two states for two peoples has become conventional wisdom on the Hill …

3 Responses to “Israel’s ‘Settlements’ are the Problem”

… What is with these blights on the backside of humanity? A vast war machine pretending to be a tiny country, a mobilized citizenry sterilized of morality, drained of compassion, bereft of conscience, bestial in war, imperial in ambition, Goliathized in its marriage of high tech and high explosive; incorrigibly bigoted bullying simpletons, little more than racists who vote for racists, fascists who fall for fascists, an embarrassment to the West, an embarrassment to the Jews, an embarrassment, at root, to the progressive individual who asks the question. …

… Solve this problem or the Jewish state will disappear in a tsunami of Palestinian births; or it will become a theocracy, a thugocracy, an apartheid, anti-democratic state that will then disappear in a wave of world anger.

There is nothing normal about a state that cannot tolerate a minority within its borders and treat them as it would have wished its people to have been treated in the centuries of Diaspora life. I would call it pathological that Israel is listening to leaders who don’t understand that the entire West Bank cannot belong to Israel without making it a pariah nation, without violating the spirit of the Torah, and the scared memory of the Jewish people. …

… We came to annihilate you; Death to the Arabs; Kahane was right; No tolerance, we came to liquidate. This is a selection of graffiti Israeli soldiers left on the walls of Palestinians’ homes in Gaza …

In Israel, research institutes count every abusive slogan scrawled on Jewish cemeteries abroad and document every problematic article, to monitor the upsurge in anti-Semitism. The media attributes importance to every piece of graffiti against assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. But the everyday racism – both institutionalized and popular, declarative and practical – against the Arabs of Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank are usually cautiously and frugally covered. …

… In his latest work, renowned Israeli author and academic Pappe does not mince words, doing Jimmy Carter one better by accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity beginning in the 1948 war for independence, and continuing through the present. … part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state. …

Pappe follows with an excruciatingly detailed account of Israeli military involvement in the demolition and depopulation of hundreds of villages, and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arab inhabitants. …

Pappe argues that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues today, and calls for the unconditional return of all Palestinian refugees and an end to the Israeli occupation. …

… While Israel never stops claiming that it has a sincere desire for peace with the Palestinians, the Israeli Housing Ministry, in coordination with other government agencies as well as the occupation army, is finalizing plans to build tens of thousands of Jewish settler units all over the West Bank, especially in occupied East Jerusalem. …

The plans, it is generally agreed, would put an end to Palestinian dreams of establishing a viable and territorially contiguous state that they could call their own …

… A leading British film director has said that a rise in anti-Semitism in Europe since Israel’s operation in Gaza is “not surprising” and “understandable,” claiming that Operation Cast Lead was “a cold blooded massacre.” …